Organizing digital images without software

In the recent past, we photographers tended to limit our shots since we may have only had one roll of film on us at any given time.

However, now that we are shooting almost exclusively on digital media (with seemingly limitless storage), we are overwhelmed by thousands of pictures, sometimes forgotten on our phone or memory cards. Digital files promise convenience and instant accessibility, but they still need to be organized and archived just as prints would!

Most photos we take today are born digital—in other words, they are created by a digital camera or camera phone and only exist in a digital format. Keeping up with the seemingly endless flood of digital photos from our phones, cameras, tablets, and other devices can be daunting.

In this course you will learn how to create a basic structure for organizing your photos without any special software. Your digital photo archive will be forward compatible, and will not be restricted to any specific platform. The instruction is not restricted to only Mac or PC users. It will work across any operating system.

In this two-hour workshop, I will help you locate and gather all of your digital images into one place, and we will set up the basic structure for a simple and functional digital photo archive. The organizing process takes time, so the course will be devoted to setting up a system that works for you, that you can them implement at home and on any computer.

Student requirements:

• This course is designed for participants with a proficiency in basic operations of their own computer. We will be searching, moving, and renaming files. Participants will bring a laptop to class. This class is not designed for organizing files via a tablet or phone, so a laptop is required.

• Instructor recommends bringing an external hard drive no smaller than 128 GB. If participants would like a recommendation, I can provide the names and purchase links of recommended products.

• Participants may bring any media on which they have photos stored–memory cards, flash drives, external hard drives, CDs, DVDs, etc. Instructor recommends participants bring their phone charger cords to transfer photos from phone to their computer.

• Participants may want to purchase applications recommended in class (to help remove duplicate images, or to sort files by date, or to create a backup of their files, etc); it will not be required to purchase these apps, but may save the students time by not requiring they search for duplicates manually, etc.